The pains of my existence

I have come to the realization, very recently, that my life has been centred around pain and suffering. This was my baseline throughout my life, and this is the antagonist of my existence.

I grew up as a female in a Third World country, with a neurodivergence.

Before I drag you into my personal story, I want to emphasize that I will intentionally use the ranking rhetoric of the world (i.e., first, second, and third world) instead of the politically correct terms like global north and global south.

The ranking rhetoric emphasizes inequalities. It carves a mental image of people who are highest in prosperity and advancement compared to others who are highest in conflict and struggle.
The ranking rhetoric does not speak of worthiness — every human being is equally worthy.
But what this rhetoric does is intensify the image of inequality, make it sting and ache.
I believe one needs to be eager to keep this sting and ache, because they can become a motivation to change something.

The politically correct rhetoric, in my opinion, merely dampens the sting and makes it less uncomfortable. For me, that is a huge trap one needs to be extremely careful not to walk into.

So, I grew up in a Third World country.
This means I was constantly surrounded by conflict, inequality, repression, violence…
Whatever it is — name it, and it was there.

We had a dictatorship for a government.
We had corruption and suppression of speech as a norm.
We had severe economic decline.
We had unjustified arrests and inhumane torture.
We had wars ongoing around us and equally affecting us.

So, on a pure existential level, the baseline of my larger environment was conflict, pain, and suffering.

On a smaller scale, I was raised in a family quite similar to the average family of my social status.
One very normal thing about these families is that violence is considered a proper way to raise an obedient child.

And yes, obedience is an important criterion when thinking about raising a child.
In our countries, we need the child to behave properly, to think properly, to move properly, to do the things parents deem important — as properly as the parents demand.

So, in the name of this “properly”, a lot of violence was practised to ensure compliance.
My family was not one of the few lucky ones that realized violence is not a good strategy.
So, violence was a present part of my upbringing.

I will admit that it was on the below-average scale of violence.
Things are not just black and white; even violence comes on a spectrum.
On this spectrum, there were definitely families that were less violent, and families that were far more violent.
So, my family was moderately violent.

However, I was a sensitive kid. Disagreements in discussions were already extremely taxing to my nervous system and made me feel the danger of violence.
So, while the violence was moderate in comparison, it was severe for me personally.

I learned very early on to avoid situations that might trigger a physical violent reaction from my caregivers.
Compared to my siblings, I was the calmest and the easiest to deal with.
I did not stand in the way of my parents. I did not make their life harder than they wished for a child.
And so, I was rewarded by not being physically assaulted.

Verbal assaults, however, were more frequent.
Again, my family is a very moderate one in violence. I will not attempt to paint a darker-than-needed image of them.
But I have been a sensitive kid.
What others would consider a small dose of violence, my body labeled as grave danger.

I learned to deal with verbal assaults by distancing myself from my surroundings — by immersing myself in my imaginary world, my books, and my thoughts.
I learned to silence my surroundings so that I didn’t notice the assaults.
And here is the second level of my existential pain and suffering.

The third level is being a female.
This existence comes with its own taxes in our Third World countries — sexual assaults.

A female body can be looked at, grabbed, touched without consent, and dominated.
The only thing separating me from a sexual assault was a man choosing to take action.

Throughout my time living in Egypt, I have come across many men who did take that action.
I have been sexually assaulted more than I care to remember — both verbally and physically, with varying levels of severity.

Again, I will admit that I had it way easier compared to other females.
The most severe thing that happened to me can actually be the easiest thing that happened to the next female.
But I am a sensitive individual.
What others judge as “easy” was already a lot for my nervous system.

And again, I dealt with these situations by avoidance —
Avoiding the memories.
Avoiding the men in the street.
Avoiding their words creeping into my ears.
Pure avoidance and detachment from my surroundings, because my body could not handle it.

The fourth level of my existential pain is my neurodivergence.

I do not have a specific name for it yet, and my therapist has been juggling with names so far.
But I now know what its name would be: “sensitivity.”

I am a sensitive person in the sense that I can see.
Since we are in a machine learning (ML) blog, this term “sensitivity” will mean the exact thing when we talk about our ML models.
In that context, sensitivity is the ability to extract what is important ¹.

I have been highly introspective since childhood.
More interestingly, I could understand many things quickly — especially emotions — without being taught about them.
In ML lingo, I would have been a few-shot or even one-shot learner!

I want to emphasize the “without being taught about them” part because this is a real problem in the environment I grew up in.
No one teaches anyone. Life just goes on. Things just happen.
One must either conform and accept the crowd’s narratives, or suffer exclusion and resistance.

For someone to “learn” in such an environment is to have great resilience towards exclusion.

I realize that I have always been a different individual since childhood when I revisit some of my memories.

I remember once when I was 12 years old, babysitting my toddler nephew. It was a constant three hours of him crying non-stop and me being unable to calm him.
The frustration piled up as the minutes passed.
By the end of my frustration, I snapped and hit him.

I can remember the feeling of that moment in my body until now. My chest clenches, my breath stops, and my brain feels appalled.
The thought I had back then was: “How did I manage to do such a horrible thing to a human being, let alone a toddler?”

Now, one might think that this is a normal reaction — duh!

But please, remember my personal story.
I come from a country and a household where violence is considered an “acceptable reaction.”
If I had managed to conform to the norm narrative, this incident would not have even made it to my conscious memory.

By age 12, I was already fully aware of the grave effect of violence.
I had adopted a pacific approach, represented by my patience for three hours, and I held myself to the standard of non-violence — as shown by my appalled reaction afterward.

By 12, I had made my own system that was completely different from the society I lived in, and I practised it.

And, with such an attitude — with such an ability to take the risk of thinking for myself — I have always been… different.

This “different” has manifested in almost all aspects of my life.
I created my own concepts of religion and would not allow anyone to force me to practise something I did not believe in (I am thankful that my family did not violate my freedom in this regard).
I created my own concepts of social and human interactions, and I hold myself — as well as people entering my life — accountable to them.
I created my own concepts of life and purpose, and I found my peace in a chaotic existence.
I created my own concepts about society and progression, and I am still learning how to navigate them.

And with this, I always had to pay the price of showing up differently.

This type of pain stayed with me until very recently.

I managed to partially get rid of my geopolitical pain by moving to a First World country.
I managed to partially get rid of my familial pain by distancing myself at times, learning new communication techniques at others, or numbing myself for as long as an interaction needed to take place.
Being in a different country also helped.

I partly lifted my female-burden by gaining more power and the ability to stand up for myself.
However, the true solution was to be in an environment that wouldn’t require me to spend so much of my existence’s energy fighting such a natural reality…
Moving to a First World country definitely helped.

So, my existential pains were partially lifted — one after another —
Except the fourth one.

The pain of presenting myself differently.
The pain of diverging.
The pain of misfitting and not belonging.

Only very recently have I begun to learn and realize that this one is not really a pain.
Being different is not something to fear.
It is not something to “handle.”
And it’s not something to run away from.

Being different is natural.
Conforming is a prison.

What I thought was one of my existential pains was merely the fact that I was lucky enough to know how I am different.
And I was lucky enough to be resilient against the fear it brings.